Reading About Us and Them: Moral but no Minimal Group Effects on Language-Induced Emotion

Abstract

Many of our everyday emotional responses are triggered by language, and a full understanding of how people use language therefore also requires an analysis of how words elicit emotion as they are heard or read. We report a facial electromyography experiment in which we recorded corrugator supercilii, or “frowning muscle”, activity to assess how readers processed emotion-describing language in moral and minimal in/outgroup contexts. Participants read sentence-initial phrases like “Mark is angry” or “Mark is happy” after descriptions that defined the character at hand as a good person, a bad person, a member of a minimal ingroup, or a member of a minimal outgroup (realizing the latter two by classifying participants as personality “type P” and having them read about characters of “type P” or “type O”). As in our earlier work, moral group status of the character clearly modulated how readers responded to descriptions of character emotions, with more frowning to “Mark is angry” than to “Mark is happy” when the character had previously been described as morally good, but not when the character had been described as morally bad. Minimal group status, however, did not matter to how the critical phrases were processed, with more frowning to “Mark is angry” than to “Mark is happy” across the board. Our morality-based findings are compatible with a model in which readers use their emotion systems to simultaneously simulate a character’s emotion and evaluate that emotion against their own social standards. The minimal-group result does not contradict this model, but also does not provide new evidence for it.

ICT acceptance, language use and information culture as tools for enhancing information literacy within smallholder maize farmers in Uganda

“…Inversely, studies have proved that inappropriate language use causes social relation challenges for individuals who are not conversant with a language hence reducing community activity participation which may hamper learning (Tenzer et al, 2021). Relatedly, unfamiliar jargons and terminologies create barriers for some users who might be unfamiliar with them especially if used without scrutiny of the environment (Hart et al, 2021;Hummel and Hörisch, 2020). However, despite its importance, there is little evidence supporting the role of language in information literacy in small and informal practices.…”

“…However, despite its importance, there is little evidence supporting the role of language in information literacy in small and informal practices. The majority of earlier academic work on language use centred on formal academic settings and social media (Bin-Hady et al, 2023;Choi et al, 2023;Nicolas et al, 2023;Hart et al, 2021;Harvey et al, 2022;Lytra et al, 2022), yet the outcomes of such studies are limited in their relevance to informal settings (Tankosi c et al, 2021), like the case of SHFs. Therefore, understanding how language use affects information literacy levels of SHFs is a priority, and will close that knowledge gap identified.…”

1 A survey of emotion theories and their relevance to language research

“…At the language comprehension side, we need to explore how linguistic and paralinguistic stimuli trigger emotion during comprehension (see, e.g., for an explicit model), and how the addressee's earlier emotional state enters the equation. As emotions are embodied, we also need to sort out which aspects of language-driven emotion can be profitably seen as "embodied language processing" (i.e., simulation), and which aspects are better viewed in other terms (see, e.g., 't Hart et al 2018Hart et al , 2019Hart et al , 2021. Furthermore, language can affect the comprehender's emotion in several ways, and it is important to understand which of these "perlocutionary effects" are actually intended by the speaker, and which are side effects.…”